New filtering options coming to New Search

Welcome to the first Ancestry.co.uk Site Features blog post. We will be bringing you news of changes to search, trees and other areas of the site, some of which will be from our US colleagues who are also working on these features. Our first post is written by Anne Mitchell, who works on the search team, and it is about upcoming changes to search, which will give you the option to further restrict the results of your search.

AUTHORED BY ANNE MITCHELL (FROM ANCESTRY.COM)

You’ve been asking for better ways to control your results. Over the next couple of months we will be launching two new sets of filters in New Search – a name filter with specific options for first and last names, and a place filter. Here’s a bit more info: • Name filters: In the New Search, when you search for a name there are two basic options: our default search or exact search, and you can manipulate either one with some clever use of wildcards. We are going to introduce options for soundex on last names, initials on first names, and other phonetic searches on both. • Place filters: Also we’ve been working to give you more control over how you search places. Let’s say you choose “Barnsley, Yorkshire, England”, but you want to search Yorkshire and all the surrounding counties, but nothing else. You’ll now be able to do that. I’ve been testing it and it’s very helpful. To get ready for these two new filters, which will give you a lot more control over your searches, we had to make some changes to the way the search form sends queries to the actual search engine. We added in the structure for these filters and while we were at it we ran it through a large volume of tests for relevancy, and made some improvements there as well. You won’t see much difference but on some of your queries you may see some changes in the order of results. These changes will be seen in New Search and Old Search without the exact option. Old exact search will not change.